Notre-Dame suicide on the altar of same-sex marriage

By Agnes Poirier, Special to CNN

Updated 8:50 AM ET, Sun May 26, 2013

Photos: Protests over gay marriage bill32 photos

Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Protesters stand in the street as they face riot police on Sunday, May 26, in Paris on the sidelines of demonstrations against a gay marriage law legalizing same-sex marriage and adoptions for gay couples. President Francois Hollande signed the measure into law on May 18 following months of bitter debate and demonstrations, including a suicide at Notre Dame Cathedral in the name of protesting same-sex marriage.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Protesters gather and sit on the ground as riot police surround them on May 26. Tens of thousands marched through Paris today to protest the law.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Protesters stand in a cloud of tear gas on May 26.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Riot police stand in a line facing protesters on May 26.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Police clash with and arrest protesters on May 26.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Riot policemen face off with protesters on May 26.

Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Opponents of the law demonstrate in front of the headquarters of the Grand Orient de France, a Masonic order, in Paris on Friday, May 24.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – A member of the FEMEN feminist activist group with writing on her chest reading "May fascists rest in hell" is arrested by police officers after taking part in a protest at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Wednesday, May 22. The protesters were demonstrating against the suicide of a far-right activist inside the cathedral the previous day.

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Photos: Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – French police stand outside Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral on Tuesday, May 21, following the evacuation of the cathedral after a man shot himself dead in front of the altar. Historian and writer Dominique Venner killed himself in front of horrified tourists after denouncing same-sex marriage and immigration.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – People holding rainbow flags attend the event Concert pour tous! (Concert for all!) on May 21 at Place de la Bastille square in Paris. The concert was a countermovement in reference to the French anti-gay marriage movement Manif pour tous (Demonstration for all), and celebrated the legalization of same-sex marriage.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Bare-chested men wearing white masks, members of anti-gay group Hommen, shout slogans as they are detained in a police bus during a demonstration against a bill legalizing same-sex marriages on May 17 in Paris.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Members of groups opposing same-sex marriage gather on Thursday, May 16, in front of the Sorbonne in Paris.

Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Supporters cheer in front of the Paris City Hall on April 23. If the measure is enacted, France would be the ninth country in Europe to allow same-sex marriage.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – People unfurl a rainbow banner in Toulouse on April 23 after the lower house vote.

Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – People yell in support of the new law Sunday in Bastille Square.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – Members of the anti-gay marriage group Hommen demonstrate on Saturday, April 20, in Rennes, France. The group was created in response to Femen, a feminist group that organizes topless protests for social issues.

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Protests over France's same-sex marriage bill – The group Hommen gathers in Rennes to protest the bill on Saturday.

Story highlights

78-year-old right-wing activist was an opponent of France's new same-sex marriage law

Controversial law signed after lengthy, sometimes bitter and angry debate

Poirier: Divide over law is both political and generational

The gesture couldn't have been more dramatic, nor the setting more grand: 78-year-old French writer and historian Dominique Venner chose the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to shoot himself in front of about 1,500 horrified visitors. Just before pulling the trigger, he had meticulously laid a letter on the altar for the police.

Venner, a former paratrooper and member of the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group opposed to Algeria's independence and which waged a war of terror against Charles de Gaulle and his government in the early 1960s, was a theorist of the French Extreme Right.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the Extreme-Right National Front party, provoked controversy when immediately took to Twitter to salute Venner's "political gesture," concluding that he had tried "to wake France up."

"Venner's models were ancient Greece and ancient Rome, he was a pagan and an anti-Christian but chose a highly symbolic place of western civilization to kill himself, " commented Christophe Forcari in the French daily newspaper Libération.

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Lately, Venner's anger had focused on the same-sex marriage bill which became law last Saturday, and the abrogation of which, he thought, the French should seek in mass street protests. He dreamt, in fact, of a reactionary insurrection, a "French Spring."

In a last post on his blog, he backed the anti-same-sex marriage march planned for this Sunday. He wrote that demonstrators were "right to shout their impatience and anger" and that laws could be overturned if the people shouted loudly enough. A xenophobe, he loathed multicultural France and called for radical and symbolic acts to "reawaken the memory of our origins."

By committing suicide in such a fashion, Venner certainly hoped to show the way to like-minded radical militants; he recently wrote: "sometimes words are not enough, they need to be substantiated by acts."

The four-month-long campaign on the same-sex marriage bill, during which supporters and protesters fought each other, sometimes violently, with hundreds of arrests, certainly antagonized the country in unexpected ways.

If a majority of the French people backed equality of treatment and therefore civil union for all, with its strings of fiscal advantages, they did however split on the second part of the bill, and the question of adoption rights and access to IVF for gays and lesbians.

In France, unlike in Britain for example, adoption and IVF for gay couples -- alongside automatic joint parenting rights -- was still illegal until last Saturday and remains controversial, simply because it touches on the highly sensitive question of family and what family is made of.

Surveys have showed that the divide is both political and generational: The Left is, for the most part, in favour of the same-sex marriage law while the hard Right, and leaders of the French Catholics, Muslims and Jews oppose it. The young, the educated and women are the main supporters of Hollande's law.

The National Assembly was the theater where such French uneasiness played out: The bill required 172 hours of heated and angry discussion, and was the most debated in recent history. Even the laws introducing abortion in 1974, and the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, required fewer hours of debate in parliament and proved less contentious.

France is the ninth country in Europe (and the 14th in the world) to adopt same-sex marriage. The first civil union of this kind, between two gay men, will take place in Montpellier next week. It will likely take years for the whole of French society to adjust to this new reality.